The Collected Poems of Marguerite Young

35 Years in the Making, Marguerite Young’s Collected Poems was co-published October 4, 2022 by Chatwin Books and Sublunary Editions.

“The Collected Poems gathers every Young poem that survives—published, unpublished, drafts—for a definitive edition that rivals the work of a university press.” - Steven Moore, Poetry Foundation

Best known for her gargantuan, elliptical novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Marguerite Young began her career as a lyric poet, working almost exclusively in the form until the mid-1940s. Her monumental study of two failed 19th century utopias located in New Harmony, Indiana, Angel in the Forest, began as a collection of some sixty blank-verse sonnets, before she resorted to prose in order to incorporate more facts and figures than the poetic form would allow. Publisher’s Weekly would say that the book was composed with “the extravagance of a poet rather than the pedantry of a historian”.

While it was her next book, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling that would canonize her as one of the most daring writers of the mid-20th century, she never strayed from the mindset of a poet, telling one interviewer that "I think that in the 1,200 pages of Miss MacIntosh, every page is a poem."

In her new and previously unpublished introduction, Young wrote that her poetry "pointed to what I would become, and there I now see the whole structure of my writing about which I may not have been wholly conscious at the time." She goes on to say that readers who encounter her poetry "may find keys to the understanding of all my life's work".

Included in the volume are Young’s two poetry collections, Prismatic Ground (1937) and Moderate Fable (1944)⁠—neither of which were reprinted after their initial runs⁠—uncollected poems that appeared in magazines like Accent, The Kenyon Review, and The Saturday Review of Literature, and a trove of previously unpublished poems, including early poems dictated from memory by Marguerite herself⁠—among them “I Heard a Bird”, which opens the collection, penned at the age of nine.

Work on this project, with Marguerite’s assistance, began in 1987.

The Collected Poems of Marguerite Young. Edited by Phil Bevis, Joshua Rothes, and Jacob Siefring.

Published October 4, 2022.

~240pp., trade paperback, $20
Chatwin ISBN: 978-1-63398-150-8
Sublunary ISBN 978-1-955190-45-9

~240pp., limited edition signed (by editors) hardcover, $60
ISBN: 978-1-63398-151-5